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Monthly Archives: August 2016

Link

I usually don’t post links on here unless I find them really interesting. This is a link to a bitcoin price chart that shows the price by date, with the current history or what was happening at that time in history. The BitFinex hack and the price associated with that date. It also shows the price recovery or decline 10 days after the event. I thought it was really interesting, and also kind of cool to see how resilient bitcoin is and how it always recovers.

BitcoinDood:Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. If you don’t mind could you tell the readers who you are and what your relationship is to POSwallet.com?

POSwallet: Thanks for reaching out to me. I am the lead dev of poswallet.com, a group of cryptocurrency die-hards that have been involved in this field since 2013. I’ve got a 15 year background in web programming and a doctorate in database engineering.

BD:POSwallet is an online staking pool. Could you tell the readers a little about the site and what a staking pool is for anyone that may not know?

PW: Sure, great question. About 6 months ago I ran into a problem where I had ~30 different wallets running on my main computer, essentially bogging down the computer enough that it became unusable. I bought another rig to just run the wallets; however, did not have a good system to keep track of my balances and stake frequency. The core of the poswallet.com software package originated as a solution to this problem.

A staking pool is a service where users deposit their coins, the coins are combined, then staked at a higher frequency than if the user staked their coins in a solo environment. This type of service allows for a much more consistent stake rate for the average user.

BD:What are some of the benefits of joining a staking pool over say, installing multiple wallets on your own machine and staking all the coin yourself?

PW: Computer resources, electricity costs, carbon footprint, and constant upgrades/wallet maintenance are all saved/eliminated by joining a group staking pool. Many users do not have the technical prowess to manage a few dozen altcoin wallets – services like poswallet.com bring the complex world of cryptocurrencies to the masses. Frankly, it is easier to set it and forget it (throwback to the 90s) than to constantly manage a few dozen wallets.

BD:At the time of this writing you have over 60 different wallets that you offer for staking. A lot of coins are using POS now. How do you decide which coins/wallets to include in the POS pool? Do you ever take coin/wallet requests for new additions? Is there any type of voting system in place?

PW: The initial ~30 coins were chosen because I owned those coins – since then, I have been adding coins as they are requested by the user base. I do not charge devs to host their coins; however, I do ask that ~0.10 – 0.25 BTC equivalent of said coin are loaded into the faucet/staking wallet. I try not to refuse any coin addition requests, as long as the coin is legitimate and has a compile-able wallet and reputable website/ANN.

BD:Without giving away any secret company info, can you talk about the type of equipment you’re using to run the service? How many machines does it take to keep something like this operating at full capacity? What are the energy requirements compared to say a mining operation?

PW:Keeping 65 blockchains synced up and processed is a surprisingly complex task. At last check, the database system supporting the website is ~20 GB large, in addition to the ~100 GB of raw blockchain data for all of the coin wallets.

In terms of hardware – we have multiple server setups for redundancy and different security measures. The number of servers is somewhere between 6 and 16 :). The overall hardware setup is still much less energy-intensive than a large scale mining setup, as CPUs/SSDs are generally much less power hungry than GPUs.

BD:Many people worry about the security of leaving their coins in a pool or on an exchange. It seems like every couple months or so another exchange is announcing that they’ve been compromised and are missing funds. On your website it mentions a review feature, and that you match balances in a cold wallet. Could you elaborate on that a little more and explain what that means?

PW: This is one area where we wanted poswallet.com to be different than other websites. First – we have coins stored in cold-storage acting as insurance against user deposits. Second – a large percentage of transactions are manually approved after review; there is a complex security system that monitors (and flags as necessary) all transactions across all of the poswallet.com user addresses. Although this does lead to a delay for a small number of transactions – generally ~30min delay for <5% of transactions – it also leads to a much more secure experience overall.

BD: The Dood never really rushes into anything. I recently transferred over a small amount of my portfolio to see how the service works; I’ve slowly been adding more. I have to say, The Dood’s impressed. Even with the little bit of coin I transferred I began seeing immediate returns in stake. The best part is I’m not tying up any of my system resources by running multiple wallets on my own machine. Can anyone join the pool? Is there a minimum balance you need of a particular coin? Can a guy do this with his faucet earnings if he wanted? What type of investments and returns can someone expect with something like this?

PW:Anyone and everyone can join – the real goal of poswallet.com is to bring altcoins to people who are not as tech-savvy as the folks that populate the bitcointalk forum. There are no minimum balance requirements and many users only have the faucet balances in their account (while still earning stakes). In terms of ROI, poswallet.com does not guarantee any return on investment – there is risk in altcoin investments. We are not financial investment advisors and don’t promise to be able to tell the future. That being said, depending on which coins a user chooses to invest in, the ROI can be relatively large. There are multiple PoS coins at poswallet.com that stake > 100% per annum. Remember, a higher interest rate is always coupled with higher risk.

Overall, even with the risk, altcoins present a possibly substantial source of income in a world full of negative interest rates.

BD:What about fees? Are there fees for deposits? Fees for withdrawals? Any minimum time required to store or withdraw coins? Any penalties for early withdrawal or anything like that?

PW: There is a flat deposit fee of 1%, which covers faucet refills and server/operating costs. If the 1% fee generates more coins than required to keep the faucets full and the lights on, the fee will be paid back out to the members. We have a few ideas on how to do this in a fun way.

There are account requirements – no penalties for withdrawals either. One thing to note: once a user sends coins to a poswallet.com address, there is an initial vesting period (different for each coin, but generally 3-4 hours) where the coins can not be immediately withdrawn. This was added to cut down on users depositing, waiting for a fast stake, then immediately withdrawing over and over; we want to keep transaction cost and server load overhead down where possible.

BD:Is there anything you would like to mention that wasn’t talked about earlier or any special site features that I may have missed?

PW: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me – great questions overall. If anyone has any more questions, please head over to poswallet.com and chat with me in the support center. Also, we are always looking for more/new/awesome PoS altcoins to add to the site.

We are always adding more features – blockchain explorers for all of the supported coins are currently under development, and the faucet has sent out over 25k claims as of this morning. If you have a good idea for a feature at poswallet.com , please send it our way!

BD: When it comes to money and finance, cryptocurrency has the potential of changing everything. I always end every interview with the same last question. Where do you see cryptocurrency going in the future. Can you share any visions, thoughts, or predictions of where you think this is all heading?

PW: I expect explosive growth in total cryptocurrency market cap over the next 2-3 years – by 2019, the total cryptocurrency market cap will be > $200B USD. We are still very much at the ground floor of this movement; however, until apps start reaching out to every day internet users, growth will be slow. We need to work together as devs to drive adoption by both techies and non-techies alike.

The Dood would like to thank the lead dev of POSwallet.com for taking the time to answer these questions and do this interview.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. The Dood hopes you found it as fascinating and informative as I did writing it. Thanks again to POSwallet dev for taking the time answer these questions. The Dood wishes you and the entire POSwallet team the best of luck on your project and all your future endeavors!

Disclaimer:Nothing posted here is meant as financial advice, Seek a duly licensed financial professional for financial advice, not The Dood. The Dood is not affiliated with POSwallet in any way, other than using the service himself. I do plan on doing a website and product review some time in the future. For now, all I’ll say is I’m happy with the service and everything seems legit. Remember you should always hold your own public and private keys, but this is a great way to stake multiple coins at once without tying up all your system resources. I wouldn’t stake my life savings on here, but this is a great way to stake a fraction of your portfolio and start earning some interest on those coins that may just be sitting around on an exchange or in a closed wallet. Not giving out advice here, just saying 🙂

I just realized I haven’t posted a coin of the month this month… Soooooo here goes. I’m going to go out on a limb, and this month we’re going to live dangerously. My coin pick for the month of August is EthereumClassic.

My reasoning for picking this coin this month is simple! This is currently a fun, volatile market to trade. I don’t know if I’d hold long term, I have no clue what the future holds for either ETH or ETC, but the current market volatility for ETC is sure to thrill. Frankly, I don’t see this ending well for either coin. That’s just like The Dood’s opinion though man! Not to mention I think some scores are being settled in the crypto community right now. All this though, makes for some really interesting trading.

Now on August 10th / 11th I think we may have hit a bottom in the early morning hours and that’s when I decided to buy in. The market began to rise shortly after touching this bottom.The below chart shows the bottom, the chart after this will show the rise.

ETC chart early morning Aug 10

Now there are a lot of factors to consider with this coin besides technical analysis. There is a lot of coin out there. There’s a lot of grumpy ETH and ETC holders depending on their side of the hard fork debate. Then there’s what happened with The DAO. So there’s a lot of factors that could drive this price either way.

Rumor is the price crash was caused by White Hat DAO hackers who were trying to crash the EthereumClassic market. I’m not super sure about all that, but something happened. So again, I’m going out on a limb and guessing that the bottom was around .00268400 Could it go lower? It’s crypto bro, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE! This could be worthless tomorrow, or we could all wake up rich if the right players got involved and drove up the price. Nobody can honestly say which way a market will move.

Now lets look at Aug 12th.

The rise and fall of ETC

So you can see the rise from early morning Aug 11th. We hit a high on Aug 12th again in the early morning right around midnight EST and then we start coming down again.

From here on out you’re on your own. Anyone that follows this blog knows The Dood’s not in the habit of giving financial advice. What I will say is this; if you don’t understand what’s happening in the ETC and ETH communities, you should probably stay away from this one. If you don’t understand basic chart structure and market patterns, stay away from this one. If you’re afraid to lose a little satoshi, stay away from this one. If however, you’re looking for a fun volatile market to trade with lots of highs and lows, this is the one for you. Currently, it’s never a dull moment. The one piece of financial advice I will give is “Never invest more than you can afford to lose, and win, lose or draw you will always have fun.”

With that said, I’ve drawn my line in the sand. I already know where I’m buying, and still contemplating my sell points. I’ve already made a little free coin from selling on the high, and still waiting for my reload point. With the market volatility of this coin, and all the excitement happening in both communities since the DAO hack this environment makes for volatility and fun trading. Be careful, have fun, and remember anything is possible in the crypto space!

Disclaimer:Nothing here is meant as financial advice. Seek a duly licensed financial professional for investment advice, not some jackass on the internet who calls himself The Dood. Thanks for reading, and happy trading!

Another interesting week in bitcoin. These are just a few of the headlines that dominated the cryptocurrency and bitcoin space over the last week. For the latest news and happenings in the cryptocurrency community, please follow my twitter.

If Ethereum didn’t already have enough problems; a dev has come forward and made claim that Ethereum is his intellectual property and the project idea was stolen from him. In order to take his battle to an international court he has started an ICO to raise money for the legal fees that will be associated with the case.

Kim Dotcom has announced Bitcache for the new and improved return of mega-upload. Although still vague on how the new file sharing site will operate, rumors have it that every file share will be accompanied by a small micro transaction of BTC.

Bitfinex made an announcement that the losses from the hack may be shared by all remaining btc holders on the exchange. All users would have an estimated 30% of their holdings shaved to cover the lost bitcoin from the hack. Later in the week it was reported that a class action lawsuit has already been filed by distraught users not willing to share in the loss.

The defense team for convicted Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht has filed a reply brief questioning the fairness of the trial that led to his prosecution. The case is full of corruption, with agents even sentenced for the theft of Silk Road bitcoin, yet Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison basically for operating a website.

Gentleman Start Your Engines!

Spent the day at the boat races, and remembered when I got home, that it was time for the crypto currency top ten ! The Dood is sun burned and burned out from the sun!

Gentleman start your engines. Time for the crypto currency top ten by market cap.

As always we’ve got Bitcoin the king of all crypto’s far ahead of the pack. Ethereum follows far behind in second, and Steem is holding strong in third. Ripple takes the fourth position followed by Litecoin in fifth. Ethereum classic remains in sixth, and Dash takes seventh. We’ve got NEM in eighth, Maidsafe remains in ninth, and Nxt maintains tenth position.

Not much changed from the previous week. The Bitfinex hack caused a small dip in price for bitcoin and ethereum, and the value of many altcoins seemed to adjust with the price of BTC. Ripple, Dash and MaidSafeCoin all show small gains in price even with the drop in BTC price; proving to be great performers in the current market .

It should be noted that Dogecoin is in the eleventh place with just under a $1,000.00 difference in market cap, hot on the heels of Nxt. Lets see if interest in Ardor is enough to keep the Nxt market cap in tenth place or if that old Doge bites him in the ass and pushes Nxt back down to the eleventh position next week.

Crypto Currency listed by market cap for the week ending 8-7-16

For a complete list of cryptocurrencies listed by market cap checkout coinmarketcap.com.

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Disclaimer: Please read!

Nothing here is meant to be taken as financial advice. All information is posted strictly as opinion. Please seek a duly licensed professional for financial advice, not some guy on the internet who refers to himself as The Dood.
Many thanks to Feedspot.com for listing The Dood in their list of top 100 Bitcoin related blogs. I feel so honored to be included in your great list of cryptocurrency bloggers! You can find the complete list of bloggers here Full list here